Galaga
Galaga (ギャラガ''Gyaraga''?) is a fixed shooter arcade game developed and published by Namco in Japan and published by Midway in North America in 1981. It is the sequel to Galaxian, released in 1979. The gameplay of Galaga puts the player in control of a space ship which is situated on the bottom of the screen. At the beginning of each stage, the area is empty, but over time, enemy aliens fly in formation, and once all of the enemies arrive on screen, they will come down at the player's ship in formations of one or more and may either shoot it or collide with it. During the entire stage, the player may fire upon the enemies, and once all enemies are vanquished, the player moves onto the next stage. Galaga has proven very successful. The arcade version of it has been ported to many consoles, and it has had several sequels, most recently Galaga Legions for theXbox Live Arcade service.The objective of Galaga is to score as many points as possible by destroying insect-like enemies. The player controls astarfighter that can move left and right along the bottom of the playfield. Enemies swarm in groups in a formation near the top of the screen, and then begin flying down toward the player, firing bombs at the fighter. The game ends when the player's last fighter is lost, either by colliding with an enemy or one of its bullets, or by being captured. Galaga introduces a number of new features over its predecessor, Galaxian. Among these is the ability to fire more than one bullet at a time, a count of the player's "hit/miss ratio" at the end of the game, and a bonus "Challenging Stage" that occurs every few levels, in which a series of enemies fly onto and out of the screen in set patterns without firing at the player's ship or trying to crash into it.[1] These stages award a 10,000-point bonus if the player manages to destroy every enemy. Another gameplay feature new to Galaga is the ability for enemies to capture the player's fighter. While the player is in control of just one fighter, a "boss Galaga" (which takes two shots to kill) periodically attempts to capture the fighter using a tractor beam. If successful, the fighter joins the enemy formation. If the player has more lives remaining, play resumes with a new fighter. The captured fighter flies down with the enemy that captured it, firing upon the player just like normal enemies, and can be shot and destroyed. The player can free the fighter by destroying the boss Galaga while in flight, causing the captured fighter to link up with the player's current fighter, doubling his or her firepower but also making a target twice as large. Research suggests that a strategy based on double shooters dominates single shooter any day. Galaga has an exploitable bug that can cause the attackers to stop firing bullets at the player, due to a coding error.[2] In addition, similar to the famous "Split-Screen bug" in Pac-Man, a bug exists in Galaga in which the game "rolls over" from Level 255 to Level 0. Depending on the difficulty setting of the machine, this can cause the game to stall, requiring that the machine be reset or power-cycled in order to start a new game. References #'^' [http://www.mobygames.com/game/galaga Galaga] at MobyGames #'^' "Computer Archeology analysis of the Galaga no-fire bug". Retrieved 2010-04-20. #'^' "Galaga". Namco Games. Retrieved 2009-05-01. #'^' "2009 News Releases". Sprint. Retrieved 2009-05-01. #'^' Description of the game on the publisher's website #'^' "Jesse David Hollington, "Namco releases Galaga 30th Anniversary Collection"". 2011-06-09. #'^' "Galaga 30th Anniversary Collection information from Apple iTunes". 2011-06-09. #'^' [http://www.twingalaxies.com/index.aspx?c=22&pi=2&gi=3773&vi=1244 "Galaga Marathon High Scores"]. TwinGalaxies.com. Retrieved 2010-06-21. #'^' "Andrew Laidlaw reclaims Galaga world record". #'^' Matthew Broderick - Fact File #'^' Official Lost Podcast/April 16, 2007 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Galaga&action=edit&section=10 editExternal links *[http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=7881 Galaga] at the Killer List of Videogames *[http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Galaga Galaga guide] at StrategyWiki Category:Namco Category:Midway Mfg. Co. Category:Arcade games